Like last year, we'll be centering this effort around PyCon. This year, we have a
year's track-record for our potential sponsors to evaluate us on.

During this year of sponsored development,
we closed a record number of tickets this year. Partially this
is due to the work that JP has done himself, partially it is due to the
increased rate at which users' contributions have been reviewed.

But we can't keep this up without help. Unless you've been living in
a very deep hole, you know that
the world's economy has exploded and a lot of companies are feeling
the pain. It will be harder in this tough climate to convince
companies that this is a good time to invest in software which "doesn't
cost anything".

At the same time, we believe that we could get an even better
outcome for the Twisted project if we can allocate more funds this
year. We could upgrade from part-time to full-time maintenance, do
more new development, and possibly even fund a Twisted conference.

This is where you come in. The people responsible for raising funds
for Twisted are mostly the same people who write code for it. The
more help we can get from you — the developers who use Twisted — the more
of our spare time we can spend writing code.

If you are interested in helping with this, especially if you have
experience doing fund-raising, please let us know on the
mailing list. This is a great opportunity for those of you who
would really like to give something back to Twisted but haven't had the
opportunity to contribute code.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that the Software Freedom Conservancy
has been extremely helpful in helping us collect donations, manage our
accounts, and deal with the legal paperwork of establishing a
non-profit. Without their help we would likely not have had the
collective attention span to establish a foundation and lay the
foundations that now allows us to collect tax-exempt donations. If
you are contributing to Twisted, please consider contributing something to
the SFC as well.